For the past three decades, psychological research has repeatedly shown that it is not always necessary for us to be conscious of events in order to perceive them, a phenomenon referred to as implicit cognition (Underwood & Bright 1996). Although this has been the subject of much research in the disciplines of psychology and social psychology, sociolinguists have only recently begun to examine how implicit cognition functions with regards to how we perceive speech (Campbell-Kibler 2012). Consistent with social psychology research on implicit responses to visually-derived social information (Greenwald et al 1998; Karpinski & Hilton 2001), recent sociolinguistic research suggests that listeners make differing conscious and unconscious social evaluations upon hearing different regional and foreign-accented speech varieties (Kristiansen 2009; Pantos & Perkins 2013), and that this is at least partly driven by socially-marked phonetic variation (Campbell-Kibler 2012, 2013). While previous research has investigated this phenomenon in relation to different regional or international varieties of English, the current study investigates the conscious and unconscious associations listeners make towards different social accents in Glasgow. This was achieved over three experiments by adapting an established psycholinguistic eye tracking methodology for sociolinguistic research. The first experiment (N=32) was conducted without eye tracking, relying on pencil and paper responses. Participants were tasked with choosing between on-screen ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’ target images (determined via a separate norming task) of brand logos and objects while recordings of different speakers uttering words semantically related to both images were heard. Non-significant trends were found in the data, with participants more likely to choose ‘working-class’ brand logos when a working-class speaker was heard and ‘middle-class’ logos when a middle-class speaker was heard. A second experiment (N=42) recorded listener eye movements in real time towards the same experimental stimuli, finding listeners to have been significantly (p < .05) more likely to fixate upon ‘working-class’ brand logos when hearing a working-class speaker than when hearing a middle-class speaker. Listeners’ verbal choices of brand logos showed no significant effect of speaker heard, showing a divergence between the on-line and off-line responses made towards speakers. Conversely, the speaker heard was found to have had a significant (p < .05) effect on the images of objects verbally chosen by listeners, but no effect on fixations made towards objects. A third experiment (N=54) investigated listener fixations towards brand logos while hearing words containing different socially-marked phonetic variants. Socially-marked phonetic realisations of CAT, post-vocalic/post-consonantal /l/, and non-prevocalic /r/ were all found to have elicited significant (p < .05) effects on listener fixation behaviour, with response times ranging from 300-700ms. A supplemental subjective reaction test (N=60) found participants to have evaluated middle-class Glaswegian speakers significantly (p < .05) more favourably in terms of Zahn & Hopper’s (1985) status attributes than working-class Glaswegian speakers, in line with the findings of previous language attitude studies (Preston 1999; Zahn & Hopper 1985; Kristiansen 2001). Overall, the results indicate that speech varieties with varying levels of perceived social status elicit differing conscious and unconscious social evaluations in listeners, and that socially-marked phonetic variation plays a role in this.

Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes offer UK-government and EU-funded support and resettlement packages to asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to aid return to their countries of origin. These programmes have attracted criticism: in particular, a questioning of the return as ‘voluntary’. This study investigates how social inequality is discursively maintained and challenged within AVR, particularly in relation to two of its central aspects: the voluntariness of the programmes and clients’ opportunities to make informed decisions about return. I combine a discursive analysis of institutional written texts and ethnographic interviews with staff, with observations from the two organisations involved – the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Refugee Action. Through an analysis of rhetorical-discursive devices, I show how power relationships are maintained and challenged, providing the institutional context for the client caseworker relationship. However, by exploring caseworkers’ positioning regarding ideological motivations for return and the gatekeeping relationship, I show how institutional, caseworker, and client power is negotiated and challenged by caseworkers. Addressing multilingualism, I show how caseworkers’ negotiation of top-down multilingualism and clients’ superdiversity may shape the environment in which clients are able to make informed decisions about return. I evidence how caseworkers are resourceful in challenging linguistic inequality, considering communicative strategies to increase clients’ opportunities to access information. The findings in this research provide detailed discursive evidence of how AVR occupies an ideologically contested space, but how caseworkers are able to effectively negotiate this space to offer impartial advice for people returning. This research considers how this client-institution relationship, and the voluntariness of return, is complicated both by the mixed motivations underpinning AVR programmes, and the superdiversity of clients. I consider what this may mean regarding problems of trust within the AVR programmes,and the difficulties the Home Office may face in its decision to bring the programmes inhouse from January 2016.

This thesis builds on cognitive stylistics, humour studies and psychological approaches to literature, film and television to explore how the stylistic features of comic novels and short stories may shape readers’ experience of comedy. I suggest that our responses to written humorous narratives are triggered by two types of stylistic cue: those which lead to amusement and stabilise our experience of comedy, and those which destabilise it by evoking non-humorous emotions associated with experiencing narrative worlds generally. When presented simultaneously, those cues can trigger complex humorous responses in which amusement is experienced alongside other, often negative, emotions. In order to investigate how textual elements can influence our emotional experience of humorous narratives, this thesis examines the ways in which stylistic cues affect some of the main experiential features of the narrative worlds of comedy: the moods evoked by the world, our relationships with characters, and our reactions to plot events. Following on from the Introduction and the Literature Review (Chapters 1 and 2), Chapter 3 explores the ways in which stylistic cues may evoke various moods by establishing, reinforcing and disrupting our expectations. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of characterisation in humorous narratives, concentrating on those cues which encourage us to laugh at narrative characters, and those which evoke other, non-humorous responses to them. In Chapter 5, I consider how the presentation of story events affects our experience of humorous plots. I discuss the cues which add humour to the presentation of otherwise problematic events, as well as those which combine humour with more uncomfortable emotions that stem from our reactions to story structures. Chapter 6, finally, provides a summary of the argument and of the contribution to knowledge made by this thesis. My exploration of the non-humorous side of experiencing narrative comedy offers a key contribution to the study of humorous narratives. By investigating humour as part of a wider narrative world, this thesis moves beyond the analysis of amusing language and towards addressing the complexity of the creation and experience of humour in a narrative world. The interdisciplinary, stylistic-psychological approach adopted here allows for hypotheses to be made not only about the emotional experience of humour in comic novels and short stories, but also about the affective side of narrative comprehension more generally.

This thesis addresses a range of research questions regarding literacy in early modern Scotland. Using the early modern manuscripts and printed editions of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s late sixteenth-century 'Cronicles of Scotland' as a case study on literacy history, this thesis poses the complementary questions of how and why early modern Scottish reading communities were encountering Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', and how features of the material page can be interpreted as indicators of contemporary literacy practices. The answers to these questions then provide the basis for the thesis to ask broader socio-cultural and theoretical questions regarding the overall literacy environment in Scotland between 1575 and 1814, and how theorists conceptualise the history of literacy. Positioned within the theoretical groundings of historical pragmatics and ‘new philology’ – and the related approach of pragmaphilology – this thesis returns to the earlier philological practice of close textual analysis, and engages with the theoretical concept of mouvance, in order to analyse how the changing ‘form’ of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', as it was reproduced in manuscript and print throughout the early modern period, indicates its changing ‘function’. More specifically, it suggests that the punctuation practices and paratextual features of individual witnesses of the text function to aid the highly-nuanced reading practices and purposes of the discrete reading communities for which they were produced. This thesis includes extensive descriptive material which presents previously unrecorded data regarding twenty manuscripts and printed witnesses of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', contributing to a gap in Scotland’s literary/historiographical canon. It then analyses this material using a transferable methodological framework which combines the quantitative analysis of micro-data with qualitative analysis of this data within its socio-cultural context, in order to conduct diachronic comparative analysis of copy-specific information. The principal findings of this thesis suggest that Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles' were being read for a combination of devotional and didactic purposes, and that multiple reading communities, employing highly nuanced reading practices, were encountering the text near-contemporaneously. This thesis further suggests that early modern literacy practices, and the specific reading communities which employ them, should be described as existing within a spectrum of available practices (i.e. more or less oral/aural or silent, and intensive or extensive in practice) rather than as dichotomous entities. As such, this thesis argues for the rejection of evolutionary theories of the history of literacy, suggesting that rather than being described antithetically, historical reading practices and purposes must be recognised as complex, coexisting socio-cultural practices, and the multiplicity of reading communities within a single society must be acknowledged and analysed as such, as opposed to being interpreted as universal entities.

With the advancement of the World Wide Web, opinion sharing online has gained a lot of popularity. These opinions are utilized for decision making, market analysis, as well as other applications. The need to harness these opinions, and the motivation behind this need has led to the development and subsequent advancement of the field of Sentiment Analysis. Various issues have arisen from these, such as difficulty in locating these opinions in a body of text, as well as determining the sentiment/polarity of these opinions. To tackle the issue of opinion polarity determination, a number of classification approaches have been developed. These approaches have focused on opinion classification at various levels, such as document, sentence and aspect levels. Most document level approaches treat documents as a bag of words during the classification process, and hence classify them as a whole. The problem with this is that there could be a mixture of opinions directed towards various aspects, within a document. It is therefore imperative to utilize a classification approach which takes into account these constituent opinions. This is the focus of classification approaches which work at the aspect level. Another important factor in the issue of sentiment/polarity classification is the choice of the classification approach. This can be machine learning, lexical/lexicon-based, and more recently, hybrid. The machine learning approaches have the benefits of carrying out classification with high accuracies, and efficiently handling large feature sets, which makes them a favourite choice where high accuracies are desired. They however also have the drawback of difficulty in adaptability, due to the domain dependency of sentiment words. The pure lexicon-based approaches do not achieve the accuracy of the machine learning approaches, but are said to offer more explainable results and take into consideration the information in lexicons. In this work, we present a novel hybrid approach, which incorporates information from lexicons in a machine learning classifier, and takes as features various linguistic knowledge sources. Our novel hybrid approach utilizes transitive dependencies to incorporate the opinions expressed towards different aspects of a document in determining the polarity classification of the whole document. The domain dependency of sentiment words is also addressed through the use of composite features and a domain specific lexicon created in this work. It was found that the use of transitive dependencies in an aspect-focused classification is a promising area, which has the potential of improving aspect based classification once the aspects have been properly determined. It was also found that although using composite features does not necessarily improve the classification accuracy, it gives rise to context rich classifiers, and the domain specific lexicon generated performed on par with the widely used generic lexicon, SentiWordNet.

This thesis examines a small but unfashionable area of Scotland, invisible to tourist guidebooks, heavily urbanised, and whose towns have won environmental ‘Carbuncle awards’ from the Scottish media. Yet it is deep in Gaelic and Scots place-names which reveal a landscape that past inhabitants perceived to be a green and relatively pleasant land, if perhaps not flowing with milk and honey. Part Three belies its numeration, in that it is the core of the study, examining in detail the place-names of eight (modern) parishes, listing old forms and attempting a sound etymology for each. Part One, based on the data gathered for Part Three, attempts to seek patterns among these names, both between and within the languages concerned. Inter alia, it seeks to explore the degree to which the choice of elements for a particular name, from any language’s toponymicon, is conditioned by cultural, political and social influences ranging from feudal and parochial authorities, through the influence of Scots-speaking merchants, to onomastic local farming customs. The lessons derived from Part One were then used to shed light on some etymologies in Part Three: and hopefully will be of value to researchers in other areas of the country.

The purpose of my research is to investigate the processes and mechanisms of semantic change in two basic colour terms: green in English and zielony in Polish. My research methodology focuses on existing English and Polish corpora, namely the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the National Corpus of Polish. I analyze my data both synchronically and diachronically (comparing two periods of time: 1985-1994, 2001-2010). My study also evaluates the use of corpus evidence for the purpose of investigating the processes of semantic change. Various factors have caused the Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) green and zielony to form metaphorical and metonymical meanings that have been conventionalised in English and Polish respectively. These processes have long played an important role in our understanding of the surrounding world. Investigating semantic changes in these two colour terms and two periods of time is key to my cross-cultural research, and this entails answering the questions: Why do green and zielony develop different senses? What are the similarities and differences between these two colour terms? How have these two terms developed and might they develop new senses in future? Are metonymy and metaphor the only mechanisms of semantic change in green and zielony? The semantic change of each colour term is shown through a network of meanings, where all the different meanings of green and zielony are presented together with their stages of development in the form of codes. Additionally each stage is a separate prototype. The aim of the network is to show the etymological prototype and various senses (new prototypes) developing from this original sense. Moreover the number of occurrences of each prototype might indicate which meaning or meanings are most common or even central in a given language at a certain point in time. The network of meanings is a visual representation of semantic change and processes involved in it. A very detailed analysis of corpus examples provides an insight into the uses of green and zielony in English and Polish respectively. The data are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Such an approach offers a thorough analysis of the two terms in question.

This thesis examines representations of ANGER in Old English by analysing occurrences of eight word families (YRRE, GRAM, BELGAN, WRĀÞ, HĀTHEORT, TORN, WĒAMŌD and WŌD) in prose and poetry. Through inspection of 1800 tokens across c. 400 texts, it determines the understanding of how ANGER vocabulary operates in the Old English lexicon and within the broader socio-cultural context of the period. It also helps refine the interpretations of wide-ranging issues such as authorial preference, translation practices, genre, and interpretation of literary texts. The thesis contributes to diachronic lexical semantics and the history of emotions by developing a replicable methodology that triangulates data from different sources. Chapter 1 introduces the field of study and shows the approaches to emotions as either universal or culturally-determined. It discusses previous analyses of ANGER in Old English and proposes a cross-linguistic, semasiological approach, which minimises ethnocentric bias. Categorisations and conceptualisations are not identical between languages, and Old English divides the emotional spectrum differently from Present-Day English. Chapter 2 presents the methodology, which draws on approaches from historical semantics and corpus linguistics, integrating methods from cognitive linguistics, anthropology and textual studies. Chapters 3 to 10 investigate each of the eight word families, analysing all occurrences in relation to grammatical category, collocations, range of meanings, and referents. Cognates in Germanic and other Indo-European languages, and Middle English and Early Modern English reflexes are examined to trace diachronic development. The thesis determines recurrent patterns of usage, distribution between text types, and socio-cultural significance. Specific passages from Old English from a range of genres are analysed and discussed. Each family is found to have a distinct profile of usage and distribution. Chapter 11 examines ANGER in the Old English translation of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis. This text exhibits usage not found in later prose or in poetry. The Cura pastoralis also presents a different framework for understanding and conceptualising ANGER to the one found in Latin. Finally, Chapter 12 synthesises my findings and considers them comparatively. These word families differ in usage, conceptual links, referents, and even authorial preferences. Most common portrayals of ANGER in Old English involve one of the three themes: ANGER AS VICE, WRATH OF GOD and ANGER AS HOSTILITY. The thesis demonstrates that a detailed analysis of lexical usage is essential for understanding larger conceptual structures within a language, and that this in turn aids the analysis of literary texts and understanding of Anglo-Saxon psychologies.

Drawing on contemporary approaches to otherness, this thesis aims to show that, despite the growing interest in so-called foreignizing translation strategies, the current theory and practice of translation in Western Europe is to a large extent still caught in nationalist self-confirmation. In the first part of my study I expose the nationalist agenda underlying the influential theories of translation developed by Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti by contrasting them with the ideas formulated by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Basing their arguments on Friedrich Schleiermacher's essay on translation, both Berman and Venuti intend to undermine the nationalist stance of current translation practice by replacing it with the belief that translation primarily serves to further the understanding of the foreign other. However, this seemingly noble purpose ultimately veils the fact that the foreign other is a construct which is devised by and thus confirms the national community receiving the translation. Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, by contrast, whose ideas were anticipated by Friedrich Schlegel, believe that the aim of translation is to reveal the otherness of the translating self. Based on these theoretical premises, I examine the significance of otherness in the current practice of translation. This case study focuses on the multidimensional reduction of otherness, as it becomes apparent in the translation of contemporary German prose in Britain, in particular, and to some extent also in France in the two decades preceding and following German unification (1980-1999). In a general overview which compares the selection of texts chosen for translation, the strategies used for their publication as well as the reception of these texts in the press, I conclude that three factors are of particular importance for the rejection of and the ensuing delimitation from German otherness in British and French translations during this period: ideological, generic and linguistic otherness. These particular areas are then further explored in the detailed studies on Monika Maron, Edgar Hilsenrath and Anne Duden. My case study proves that the translators and/or publishers of these authors tend to reject or appropriate those elements of their texts which would highlight the otherness underlying the British and French selves. However, these strategies of dealing with otherness are not limited to interlingual translation. They are anticipated in the reception of the respective texts within Germany.

In the field of manuscript studies, the identification of individual scribes and the reconstruction of their lives and work through examination of manuscript material has recently undergone revival. This thesis contributes to that field by presenting two biobibliographical case-studies of two fifteenth-century scribes and Carthusian monks, William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. It sets out to demonstrate the value of an integrated biographical and comparative approach in the examination of the making and circumstances of making of manuscript books. This is demonstrated by building scribal biographies based on the integration of evidence from documentary record and the analysis of the material manuscript output of Mede and Dodesham. Dodesham, as the more prolific of the two, has been more fully investigated in recent scholarship. New documentary evidence, however, has necessitated a fresh appraisal of his life and the contexts of his copying, contexts which I argue are strongly educational. I show that Mede’s life and work as a Carthusian reader, copyist, and perhaps writer, is therefore worth further scholarly investigation. Chapter one considers the current state of the field of historical biography and, more specifically, scribal biography. It assesses the usefulness of integrating biographical and codicological approaches in the study of manuscripts and provides a definition of codicology in its broader sense (as a means of writing biobibliographical histories). As not all aspects of codicology are considered here, I also identify those aspects of codicological enquiry I have chosen to apply to the manuscripts of Mede and Dodesham. The case is made for the usefulness of codicological methods as a means of interpreting historical material. As the main focal points of this study are the lives and work of two Carthusian scribes, chapter two provides context on the Carthusian life, incorporating an evaluation of recent work on Carthusian textual culture, a brief summary of the Order’s history, its administrative structure, Carthusian spirituality, its participation in the intellectual culture of the late medieval period, how it responded to changing patterns in devotion, and its members’ attitudes and approaches to the acts of reading, writing and copying. This background is essential in contextualising the scribal activity of Mede and Dodesham and will be referred to in the following chapters. Chapters three and four are dedicated to the case studies examining the lives and work of William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. Chapter three, containing the case study of William Mede, includes analysis of his Anglicana and other idiosyncratic features of his hand; full descriptions of each of the six manuscripts so far attributed to him; and study of his language and punctuation practices, which vary, I argue, depending upon for what sorts of audience Mede is writing or copying. A detailed study of the Speculum devotorum demonstrates this adaptive scribal behaviour in action and also investigates the possibility that Mede may have been the author of the text. The above are all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Mede’s manuscripts. The conclusion to the chapter offers a summary of Mede’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation of this Carthusian scribe. Chapter four, the case study of Stephen Dodesham, includes a reappraisal in light of new evidence of his early scribal career, including his ordination at Sheen charterhouse, potential connections with the prominent Dodesham family of Somerset and connections with middle-class, professional families in London and around the south-western counties of England. This new evidence has made it possible to more firmly place the contexts of Dodesham’s manuscript copying. Much of chapter four is dedicated to analysing his language, and providing brief descriptions of those manuscripts so far attributed to him; the above all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Dodesham’s manuscripts. The conclusion offers a summary of Dodesham’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation as of particular interest in the areas of developing literacy and education. In chapter five, I bring both case studies together, assess the usefulness of the biographical approach in the context of this particular study, and evaluate its successes and limitations as a framework for combined biographical and codicological investigation.